Huh. Looking back over the logo photos for our last three Green News Reports in a row (April 18, 23 and 25 of 2013), there seems to be a common thread developing. And it's not a good one.

And, with all of that, none of them even have anything to do with last week's bombing in Boston.

USA! 'Nuff said...

On today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, we had a tremendous report from on the ground in West, TX, by RT America producer and reporter Ramon Galindo. He's been there since last Wednesday, having arrived on the scene just hours after the huge explosion at the West Fertilizer Company plant.

To date, 15 have been killed by the blast, including 12 first responders, with nearly 200 others injured. The explosion covered some 37 blocks and left a crater nearly 100 feet wide and 10 feet deep at the plant itself. Galindo offers the latest on how the tiny town of 2,600 is holding up, how they are dealing with concerns about governmental oversight of the plant (or lack thereof), and the continuing investigation into the mystery of what may have caused the disaster.

In an attempt to shed some light on the several other huge news events which received far less coverage than they would have otherwise, during last week's News Week from Hell, I also covered the new bi-partisan report on torture by the Bush Admin after 9/11 and the latest in the investigation of the attempted ricin attack on President Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and a judge in Lee County, Mississippi.

All of that, a few listener phone calls, and Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report and more, on today's KPFK BradCast...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

P.S. The BradCast is now also heard on the Progressive Voices channel on TuneIn, Saturdays at 6p ET and Sundays at 4p ET.

The good news: When the largest voting jurisdiction in the nation gets its new voting system, perhaps as early as 2015, it will not including Internet Voting, according to Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk of Los Angeles. The bad news: It will very likely include touch-screen computers and, with them, 100% unverifiable voting.

I interviewed Logan last week on my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show [full audio interview is at the bottom of this article], and we had a very informative discussion about what voters in Los Angeles may have to look forward to in the coming years, as well as many of you in the rest of the country, since the new system is being designed with an eye towards selling it to other counties in California as well as in the rest of the country.

So this is not just a local L.A. story. It's likely to affect the way that votes are cast and tallied in much of the nation. It's well worth paying attention to, even if, unlike me, you don't live here.

Los Angeles County alone "has more voters than 42 of the 50 states," according to Logan's office. It features nearly 5,000 precincts. Well over 3 million votes were cast in this one county alone during the November 6, 2012 Presidential Election. When Logan took over the job of Registrar after our previous one resigned, suddenly, just months before the 2008 President Election, he had a monster of a job to take over. It's still a monster. And it may soon get even more gargantuan as he attempts to re-work, re-design and, indeed, re-think how voters vote here, and as we move from our current publicly-owned voting system to our next publicly-owned voting system. (L.A. is one of the very few jurisdictions in the nation which owns, maintains and designs its own system. Most similar systems in the rest of the state and nation are proprietary, owned by the private companies which make them, and don't allow even the election officials in those jurisdictions access to their "trade-secret" software and source code.)

While, happily, Logan offered me some assurance that we won't be casting votes over the Internet with his new system --- an assurance that should bring some measure of relief to both Election Integrity advocates as well as the consensus of computer science and security experts who are also experts in voting systems --- there is still much cause for concern, as this still-unknown voting system begins to take shape...

With the U.S. stock market hitting all-time record highs again of late, it'd be understandable for some to think strength and confidence has returned to the stock exchange.

But if today's mid-day "flash crash" --- which saw the S&P Index lose $136 billion in a matter of four minutes as AP's Twitter feed was hacked to announce, inaccurately, that a bomb had gone off in the White House --- is any indication, that's hardly the case...

You'll be delighted to know, of course, that the same casino, stock market immediately gained almost all of its losses back in almost the same amount of time it took to lose them, ultimately ending the day at another near-record high. Step right up!

It was quite a moving show last night in the Nevada State Senate, as a Joint Resolution was passed that would repeal the Constitutional ban on marriage equality in that state, as passed by voters over a decade ago.

All of the state Senate's Democrats supported the resolution, and one Republican jumped onto the right side of history in a surprise last-minute move. One Democratic Senator even came out as gay during the floor proceedings.

The measure passed the Nevada Senate 12 to 9 and will now head to the Assembly. If successful there, it will face one more vote in both chambers in 2015 before appearing on the 2016 ballot for approval by voters who, according to recent polls there, are now believed to be in favor of lifting the ban. So, as MLK famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Dramatic speeches on the floor during debate on the resolution led even jaded long-time Nevada report Jon Ralston, who covered the debate live via his Twitter feed, to observe: "Too often we who cover politics think of these people as automatons pressing a red or green button. Not tonight. Raw, emotional, human."

"Great to be not just a witness to history (or the beginning, at least), but to see politicians stripped down to who they are was something," he noted, before adding: "I feel sorry for reporters who weren't here to feel the electricity in this chamber."

But with Democrats across the country now seemingly falling over themselves to suddenly support marriage equality --- redefining the word "evolution" (or, perhaps, more accurately, attempting to redefine the word "flip-flop") --- even Republicans, at least Republicans in the Northeast, are also now showing signs of scrambling to get onto the right side of history as well.

This early evidence of that arrived in my inbox this morning, from the FreedomToMarry.org group...

Among the many items which would have otherwise been top stories --- some even meriting wall-to-wall cable news channel coverage --- during last week's Worst News Week Ever™, was the release of a landmark bi-partisan report on the use of torture by the U.S. following 9/11.

The Constitution Project's "Task Force on Detainee Treatment" is described as "an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel charged with examining the federal government’s policies and actions related to the capture, detention and treatment of suspected terrorists during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations."

It is headed up by former Congressmen Asa Hutchinson (R) and James R. Jones (D). Hutchinson also served as a top official in the George W. Bush Administration.

"In many respects," the introduction to the report explains, "this Task Force report is the examination of the treatment of suspected terrorists that official Washington has been reluctant to conduct."

As the New York Times' Scott Shane detailed in his barely noticed coverage last Tuesday (the day after the Boston Marathon bombing and the day before the deadly explosion at the West, TX fertilizer plant)...

We will reserve the option of returning to this matter in the near future in more detail. But, as we're still recovering, as you may be as well, from a horrible news hangover following last week's Week From Hell (during which Andy Daly tweeted accurately: "When an Elvis impersonator trying to kill the President is the least interesting news story of the week, you know some shit went down") we are going to go easy on this matter for the moment, and defer instead to the The Daily Show's coverage of this disturbing report...just to help take the edge off things for now. You're welcome.

Today is the three year anniversary of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill and manslaughter disaster. 11 men were killed and more than 200 million gallons of crude spilled into the Gulf in what would turn out to be the largest accidental oil spill in world history.

A remark on last week's Real Time with Bill Maher drew my attention back to the woeful "advocacy journalism" (I'm being kind there) of those on the Right who continue, even to this day, to perform public relations work for the fossil fuel industry under the guise of "journalism".

Maher cited an embarrassing quote from an article by Steven F. Hayward, published by the unapologetically-wrong-on-just-about-everything Weekly Standard (the "brain"-child of its also-unapologetically-wrong-on-just-about-everything editors William Kristol and Fred Barnes) which, for non-RW loon reporters, might have been a career-ender. Or, at least, for non-RW loon reporters, it might have led to the humblest of apologies and acknowledgment for having been so tragically wrong. No such apologies or contrition occur in RW Media "Expert" Land, unfortunately, where there is no inaccuracy too wrong and no prognostication so off base that it might cause shame or humility or, gasp, an invitation from its publishers to never write there again.

Just days before the explosion of BP's rig and the death of those workers (BP recently pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter, after which nobody from BP went to jail, naturally), Hayward wrote: "Few areas of national policy offer as bad a ratio of blather to substance as energy. It is a field where cliché, wishful thinking, and wince-inducing ignorance dominate the discourse."

"No matter how patiently or repeatedly the myths and realities of energy are explained," Hayward condescended, "we are nowhere near being able to replace God's gift of dirty, toxic fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy. "Liberals," he noted, "are the worst offenders," when it comes to this naive, misinformed wishful thinking.

Hayward, the sage and much-smarter-than-you Fellow from the American Enterprise Institute, went on to write in his article, published on April 16, 2010 [emphasis added]...

Just four days later, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf.

That's not all he was wrong about, of course. The same article article also offered the wisdom --- just two years prior to the hottest year in recorded history in the contiguous U.S. and the ninth hottest year on record globally --- that "the case for catastrophic global warming" was "in free fall"...

5:50pm PT: Boston Police tweet: "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody." Watertown residents stream into streets to cheer police as cars roll back out of town...

5:47pm PT: Local media: Second "suspect alive, in custody, and they're asking for a medic. It's over." Applause heard breaking out around scene. || Boston Police tweet: "Suspect in custody. Officers sweeping the area."

4:31pm PT: "Barrage of gunfire" heard in Watertown. "Body found on a boat," reports NBC's Pete Williams. Area locked down, officials respond, reports of suspect surrounded...unclear whether person is still alive...

12:51pm PT: Noteworthy developments since I last checked in here. The suspects are brothers from Chechnya and have been in the U.S. for two years or more. The one who was killed is 26-year old Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The one still on the lam is 19-year old Dzhokhar. Here's another good timeline of the overnight events through 8:40am ET today as the city remains shut down during the on-going manhunt...

3:15am PT: All MBTA transit trains and buses have been shut down, as the man hunt continues. Since I suspect this is all going to be over, one way or another, by the time I wake up, and since it's the second near-all-nighter I've had here in a row, I'm going to try and hasten things by going to sleep. Though I'll likely still be following along and retweeting on The Twitters.

1:55am PT: It's been a wild night, where we've been trying to keep up with and/or make sense of developments via Twitter.

So far, one MIT officer has been shot dead. Another local law enforcement official is in critical condition after a gunfight with the alleged Boston Marathon bombing suspects. One of those suspects, the one seen in the black hat in photos released by the FBI earlier today, is now dead, according to officials.

The other suspect, in the white hat, is being pursued in the Watertown area at this time, where residents have been asked to stay inside, lock their doors, and do not open it unless it is for the police who are going yard-by-yard searching for the second suspect. He is believed to be armed and very dangerous.

Here, via CBS Boston, is what happened up until now, over the past 5 hours or so, according to a description offered by the Middlesex District Attorney...

First read this short story please. Then this one.

Thank you.

UPDATE 4/18/2013, 5:41pm PT: AP reports West, TX mayor says "around 35 people, including 10 first responders" were killed in the explosion. "He said not all the bodies have been recovered. Muska told the LA Times the number might be as high as 40 dead and said he got that number because all other residents and first-responders were identified."

UPDATE 4/18/13 3:23am PT: Waco's KWTX has revised their earlier report of "as many as 60 or 70" dead, which was sourced to the town's EMS Director Dr. George Smith. They now report a death toll of "five to fifteen people", as of 4:45am local time, sourced to "officials". AP confirms the report of "between five and 15 people" killed, a number which is expected to rise, according to Waco Police Sgt. William Patrick Swanton. They add that "more than 160 others" are injured. Among the dead are believed to be "A group of volunteer firefighters and a single law enforcement officer who responded to a fire call at the West Fertilizer Co. about an hour before the blast. They remained unaccounted for early Thursday morning."

UPDATE 10:30pm PT: Randy Lee Loftis at Dallas Morning News reports...

Loftis adds via Twitter: "OSHA online records show no federal inspections of #West Fertilizer Co. in the past 5 yrs."

UPDATE 10:10pm PT: Texas Dept. of Public Safety spokesperson holds short press conference: "Tremendous amount of injuries...There are confirmed fatalities. Number not confirmed yet ... Devastation like Iraq or Oklahoma City ... 50-75 houses and apartments destroyed... Nursing home w/ 130 residents was in path of fire ... Wish I could tell you more." A reporter asks for a death toll number, asks the spokesman to "confirm 60-70" number. He says he "cannot confirm that number."

UPDATE 9:44pm PT: Dallas NBC affiliates live coverage cannot confirm death toll reported by Waco's KWTX below, but says 200+ injured, "at least 40 critically" at this moment.

UPDATE 8:59pm PT: Really hoping local media has it wrong... Waco's KWTX is now reporting: "West EMS Director Dr. George Smith says as many as 60 or 70 people died and hundreds were injured Wednesday night in a fertilizer plant explosion in West."

KHOU 11 News Houston is reporting "5 firefighters & 1 police officer" among the dead. They add: "Hundreds of others are wounded in the town with a population of about 2,800."

Amazing video of blast added to top: [More UPDATES at bottom of article]...

UPDATE 9:15pm PT:

Apartment near explosion in #West twitter.com/roncorning/sta…

— ron corning (@roncorning) April 18, 2013

EARLIER...

Like we needed more news today...fake or otherwise. Unfortunately (see photos and seismograph chart below), this one is not fake. From Reuters tonight...

The photos tweeted below are pretty amazing. [ALSO UPDATES NOW ADDED]...

I'm getting ready for today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica, so, in the meantime, if you're wondering what you may have missed today, among other things, it seems the Boston Marathon Bomber has taken down another victim: CNN.

As Josh Marshall at TPM describes this montage, it was "CNN's 90 Minutes of Awesome"...

To be fair, it wasn't only CNN who blew it today, they just led the pack. Salon has the timeline of CNN's epic failure and the similar ones that accompanied it from Fox, AP and Reuters as well.

If South Carolina used anything but the exact same 100% unverifiable voting machines that previously resulted in the inexplicable election of Alvin Greene as their 2010 Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, I'd say Stephen Colbert's sister Elizabeth Colbert Busch has just won her upcoming May 7th Special Election for the U.S. House over former Gov. Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford.

From AP tonight...

But again, before you Democrats get too excited at this point, please read this. Thank you.

UPDATE 4/17/2013: Sanford responds and National Republicans toss him under bus...

[UPDATED MANY TIMES AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE, NOW INCLUDING FINAL WRAP (FOR NOW) ON THE DAY AFTER.]

From AP, via National Memo...

More photos at ThinkProgress...

The blasts reportedly occurred near the Marathon headquarters in a nearby hotel. The headquarters has been locked down. Additionally, NBC News is reporting:

MANY UPDATES THROUGHOUT THE DAY, AND A WRAP UP ON THE DAY AFTER, ALL NOW FOLLOW BELOW...

So...funny thing. After yesterday's BradCast on KPFK, I drove the delightful Desi Doyen (of our Green News Report) out to The Young Turks' studio where she was scheduled to guest host once again last night. Two minutes or so before airtime, the third guest-host had yet to arrive. Guess who was drafted into last-minute duty?

Unshaven, jacket-free and prep-less, the show went on. With Desi, myself, and the great Jimmy Dore on board, it was an all-KPFK/Pacifica Radio episode of TYT, to boot!

We discussed, among other things, the mass stabbing in TX yesterday (where nobody died!); Rand Paul's claim that Republicans and he are civil rights champions; Obama's attempt to slash Social Security; and the plan for a vote in the U.S. Senate on a gun sale background check bill.

Below are a few short edited video segments with the three of us on last night's lively hour of The Young Turks [Update 4/16/2013 - The Turks have posted a few more clips --- including our discussion about Pat Robertson and climate change denier extraordinaire Rep. Joe Barton --- so I've also now added those below as well]...